Pretty please with a cherry on top

 

'The End' by Heather  Phillipson is currently on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, and it utterly delighted us. I love the way it slumps over the sides, threatening to engulf the stonework. After Monkey and I had successfully located the Japanese embassy we sat in Cafe Nero and watched the comings and goings on the square for an hour (who knew there were so many we'll-get-your-shopping-for-you apps, every other bus had an advert for a different one). 

Then other thing that delighted me was this wonderful replacement for the 'little green man'. It had never occurred to me that the little man was not just a 'human being' and had no need for it to somehow also represent some cliched skirted version of a woman too. However symbols are important. The world is full of symbols of a male figure that are supposed to be accepted as a generic human. I am sorry (not sorry) if some people (men) get upset at the replacement of these symbols or think that people should "stop making a fuss" about such little things. It is about the fact that the symbols and messages are ubiquitous, and it is time for new symbols that include everyone. We should all feel safe to cross the road.

After our shared lemon muffin we wandered back down Piccadilly and whiled another hour away in the impossibly huge Waterstones. Then we wandered back to the embassy. It is so posh that during the winter when the trees are bare it has a view of Buckingham Palace. I sat in the park while Monkey sat in a queue to have her documents checked. She must do the whole horrible coach journey again next Wednesday to collect her visa, but all being good she will fly out a week on Monday.

I have enjoyed John Green's easy and slightly sentimental novels and also enjoyed 'The Anthropocene Reviewed'; he revels in the human world, what we have done to the planet, both the good and the bad, even when it descended into nostalgia and sentimentality. Each essay just talks about a particular thing that humans have created, how it has impacted the wider world as well as his own life, and then gives it stars, as if it were an online review. He is a thoughtful person and a good writer so although I flicked past the essays on Super Mario Cart and CNN I found myself very engaged in the history of the QWERTY keyboard. Here he talks about a conversation he has with a casino dealer:

"There's a certain way I talk about the things I don't talk about. Maybe it's true for all of us. We have ways of closing off the conversation so that we don't ever get directly asked what we can't bear to answer. The silence that followed James's comment about having been a kid reminded me of that, and reminded me that I had also been a kid. Of course it's possible that James was only referring to Wendover's shortage of playgrounds - but I doubted it. I started sweating. the casino's noises - the dinging of slot machines, the shouts at the craps tables - were suddenly overwhelming. I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn't dead; it's not even the past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of. I played out the hand, tipped the dealer, thanked the table for the conversation, and cashed out my remaining chips." (p.188)

He, in many ways, tells you far more about himself than I feel might have been his initial intent in any of these essays. But also, of course, about the human condition. Very readable. I will certainly be checking out The Mountain Goats on Spotify and possibly buying his wife Sarah's book 'You Are an Artist'. He ends most upliftingly, and in pleasing synchronicity with Oliver Burkeman:

"Sometimes, I wonder how I can survive in this world where, as Mary Oliver put it, 'everything/ Sooner or later/ Is part of everything else.' Other times, I remember that I won't survive, of course. But until then: What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth."

Stay safe. Be kind. Breathe.